Well, the new Traction book I’ve been reading is forcing me to look at my endeavor as a business for the first time. One of the first steps is to stop and decide what you want out of the business. This is a time to be a bit realistic and a bit optimistic. Consider this your goal. Like every goal, it should be attainable, but don’t settle if you believe you can achieve more. It’s strange, but something so simple is really more challenging than I expected. When you force yourself to take an honest assessment of what you have, where your going and where you want to end up… well, it’s eye opening.
So, how do you go about figuring out your 10 year plan? Quite simply, just start writing. You start with your objective. Do you want to sell this and start again? do you want to run this forever? Then, you need a revenue number, it could be a sale price or a yearly . Can you be $1,000,000 per year? $10,000,000? more? Now’s the time to take a guess. Now, you need to figure out how you’re going to get there. What is your business? How do you plan to evolve over the next 10 years? Obviously, you can predict everything, but you need a game plan, a direction, a vision. For example, I know that if I’m going to survive in the world, I need to be involved in the Internet of Things. In what fashion, I can’t say yet… but at least I have a vague vision 🙂
Now, fill in as much of your vision as you can. How many employees do you have? what is profitability? Are you expanding into new businesses or industries? Anything you want to happen, write it down. Then refine it. Based on the details are you numbers feasible? Can you really get enough customers to make the revenue number? Be honest…
More to come. Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike